This is a very nice story that I though you would appreciate: MOH recipient: 'My wife is my rock' Nov 16, 2010 By Elizabeth M. Collins Photo Credit: Courtesy of Jennifer Giunta. Staff Sgt. Salvatore “Sal” and Jennifer Giunta on their wedding day in Mexico November 2009. She has stood by his side through two deployments and the confusing, surreal and bittersweet whirlwind that followed his Medal of Honor announcement by President Barack Obama in September. Giunta calls her his rock and his hero. WASHINGTON (Army News Service, Nov. 16, 2010) -- As President Barack Obama hangs the pale blue ribbon holding the Medal of Honor around the neck of Staff Sgt. Salvatore "Sal" Giunta in a White House Ceremony today, Giunta's wife Jennifer will be at his side, offering her quiet support, just as she has done throughout his two deployments, and especially during the whirlwind of media interviews and VIP meetings that followed the award announcement in September. He is the first living servicemember to receive the nation's highest award for conspicuous gallantry in combat since the Vietnam War -- for stopping two terrorists from kidnapping his wounded friend during a fierce battle in Afghanistan in October 2007 -- which he said doesn't make him a hero, and she said makes her proud, of course, but doesn't change the way she feels about her husband. "Sal's still the same guy he was before," Jennifer said as Giunta noted he still has to do the dishes at home. "It holds a lot of meaning," she said about the medal, "and I think that he's a hero, but I think that everyone who goes is also a hero, and he did what he did, because that's the type of person he is." They met soon after Giunta enlisted and was stationed with the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team in Vicenza, Italy, where Jennifer was doing a college internship, and they were soon inseparable, so much so that she didn't want to go home at the end of the summer. He would be deploying the next winter and she knew - she knew - she had to find a way to make it work. Photo Credit: Courtesy of Jennifer Giunta. Now-Staff Sgt. Salvatore “Sal” Giunta with his now-wife Jennifer as he prepared to deploy for a second time in summer 2007 – to Afghanistan’s dangerous Korengal Valley, where he would rescue a wounded friend from two enemy fighters and earn the first non-posthumous Medal of Honor since Vietnam. Letters and phone calls "It's hard, you know, to know that he was going to go," she said. "I just thought, 'I'm going to write a lot of letters so that we can stay connected in some ways, so that hopefully when he gets back, we feel like we weren't apart as much as we really were.'" After he returned that first time and she finished school, they knew they had to be together, so figuring she'd find a job, Jennifer left her family and friends and moved back to Italy. She never expected that Giunta would be stop-lossed and not only sent back to Afghanistan for 15 months, but sent to one of the most remote and dangerous areas of the country, the Korengal Valley, nicknamed the 'Valley of Death.' They weren't married yet, so she didn't have access to the full benefits or support system that spouses enjoy, but Jennifer didn't want to go home to Iowa and be even farther from Giunta and the little news she could get. So she moved in with a friend who was an Army spouse, and they leaned on each other. Because phone calls were infrequent at best and even then lasted only 15 minutes, and "when a month or two goes by, 15 minutes is like a second," she said. She and Giunta wrote letters again to stay in touch -- letters that meant everything to Giunta as he sat in his primitive firebase on a mountainside in Afghanistan, getting shot at every day. "It was good to be able to have her there and hear her stories and be able to enjoy some life other than those mountains during that time, to get her letters. You know, she'd spray it with some perfume and I could smell the perfume. I had a little pillow and in the pillowcase, I'd just slide all the letters in my pillow, so I'd sleep on her perfume and her letters. And it matters," remembered Giunta, the tough paratrooper who took on the Taliban singlehandedly, but whose face softens when he looks at his wife during interviews. Fate It had been a long, hard deployment for both of them, but it wasn't even halfway over on Oct. 25, 2007, when it suddenly got much worse. Jennifer got a frantic, tearful phone call from the wife of one of the men in Giunta's unit. "She told me that (Sgt. Joshua) Brennan - she told me that Brennan had died. And she told me that Sal was a hero and that she didn't know when I was going to hear from him," Jennifer said, crying. "I think the next day or two he called, and I was so happy to hear his voice. You build this really tight connection with them, so tight that you can tell their mood just by their voice. I could tell that he wasn't doing well, but I could also tell that when I hear that tone of voice, he doesn't want to talk about it. "He said, 'How are you doing?' I kind of told him what I'd been doing and maybe five minutes went by and I said, 'Look, I know what happened. Are you OK? I'm so sorry. Are you OK?' And he said, 'I'm fine. Don't worry about me. I'm fine.' I said, 'Shut up. I know you're fine. I know you're physically OK, because you're talking to me right now, but are you really OK?' And again he said,...
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Nov 23 2010, 02:20 AM
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